Oculus Rift unveiled a new "Crystal Cove" unit at CES today, with the new
version of their Oculus VR headset sporting an upgraded OLED display and newly
added positional tracking. There are details on this on
Polygon, where they learned that these changes will not greatly increase the
cost of the units. "Cost has always been at the crux of the entire Oculus
platform, if the hardware is not affordable, it might as well not exist," Nate
Mitchell of Oculus told them. "We made sure this is a low-cost solution without
sacrificing any quality. This is a top-notch positional tracking system." They
have some info on both changes, saying OLED panel has an unusually high refresh
rate and the ability to fire an individual pixel "for a fraction of a
millisecond and then turning it off and then going black until the next pulse."
They also discuss what the positional tracking adds:

One of the demos
shown at CES will feature the player sitting across from a fantasy character in
Unreal Engine 4, with a table that features a tower defense game resting between
you. Positional tracking will allow the player to lean forward and study the
board and details of the units. The extra three degrees of movements would also
allow players to lean out a virtual window, for instance, in order to look
around while still keeping their body in cover.

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entr0py wrote on Jan 8, 2014, 01:43:Ah, he side stepped the only thing I care about, resolution. I don't care about how organic and decomposable the display is. I only care that it doesn't look like SVGA graphics from 20 years ago.

This is indeed the biggest issue. The native resolution has to be at least 1080p, anything else and playing sims with this gear will be impossible. Well not impossible, but fucked up all the same. If I cant read the gauges in my cockpit or see the bogey out of my cockpit I might as well be flying blindfolded...

They've already confirmed that the consumer display will be at least 1080P. That will still seem very pixelated in a Rift. 1440P phone screens should be coming this year, and Samsung has said that they are working on a 4k phone display for 2015.

I think it's pretty funny you guys are focusing on resolution, forgetting you want to play games on that thing. The problem is not resolution, the problem is you need to run games at 120*2 fps because you have 2 viewpoints. There may be optimization possible but even then, you are looking at a massive new GPU investment to ever run a game on the rift "optimal". You can pray to the seven hardware gods that the resolution won't increase. Because beyond 1080p no GPU on this planet runs a modern game at 120fps.... and that's assuming you want 60fps per eye.. and not 120 as it is optimal.

What the hell are you talking about? Are you talking about the frames per second or the refresh rate? Because these are not equivalent.

The refresh rate of 120Hz is a function of the screen and not really tied to the performance of the graphics card.

Ehm.. last I checked I said FPS like 5 times... I am talking about actual image rendered by your GPU. optimal for VR is 120 images per second per EYE Which the OR should be able to do, except on 1 panel (so half horizontal res). This means you need to render a game TWICE at 120fps for 8ms delay (at the resolution of 960x1080), or twice at 60fps if you want 16ms delay. The OR currently says it runs at 90hz (meaning you can push up to 90 fps per eye) but who knows whether that's the maximum or just that they have problems running all this data. 4k resolution is also an INSANE data volume. So there hardware reasons that limit resolution, aside from cost factors.

If you don't know how VR works I'd suggest reading the post by Valve about it. 60 fps is not 100% optimal... and even that not optimal frame rate needs to be rendered twice, at the same time with different viewports (which means aside from physics you can forget doing this without 2 dedicated GPU's) and these GPU's need to be in perfect sync with each other.

This is why they don't increase resolution beyond 1920x1080 .... 4k or rather 3840*2160 would require you to render a game at 1920*2160 ........ see the problem? How many games you know that run at 60 fps with such high resolutions? And with 2 viewpoints.... ? What about 90 fps? or 120?

You are hard pressed to find old games that run this fast even today, and even if you find games and settings that run at these speeds you would still be CPU bound, as Direct X and OpenGL add a HUGE layer of crap between GPU and GAME. Mantle might be a way to at least fix that problem.

Point is. Resolution is like the smallest least significant problem VR has. Frame rate and delay is what makes or fails VR.